Myself Undone

chronicling the journey away from civilization

Saturday, November 05, 2016

Modern-Day Belief and Desire in Mission Impossible Rogue Nation

No, the entertainment industry does not explicitly advocate
the causes of today’s ruling class. If truth be told, both the TV and film industry,
as capitalist as any other, have a long history of doing the exact opposite, of
seeming to bite the hand that feeds them. Capitalist figures (think Montgomery
Burns, Jabba the Hutt, Ebenezer Scrooge, Gordon Gekko, and so on) are far more
likely to be portrayed as villains than as heroic saviors. And any film that
explicitly aims to promote the virtues of capitalism will have little if any
chance of raising the necessary capital to go into production, a seeming irony.
But to see the lack of a pro-capitalist message as evidence of an
anti-capitalist “liberal” bias in the entertainment industry, or, more alarming
to some, as a sign of weakness within capitalist hegemony, is to misunderstand
how power and ideology function in our time.

Consider the newspaper industry as an example. Sure, almost
every major newspaper in the U.S. is owned by one or more major corporations
who have explicit if unwritten rules about what can and can’t be covered as news,
but, to be profitable, a newspaper can’t simply publish information that
accords with the interests of specific corporations. Though newspapers may be
owned by capitalists, it’s the masses, the working-class primarily, who have to
buy those newspapers in order for the capitalist owners to make a profit. You
won’t sell many papers by reporting exclusively on the fluctuations in the
stock market, the year’s top wines, golf and yachting tips, or international
tax havens. A profitable newspaper has to represent the dominant ideology in such
a way that it appeals to the interests of ordinary people. To do that, it has
to dwell on non-threatening (and seemingly
apolitical) consumer interests, such as sports or celebrity gossip, and it can’t
entirely ignore the sincere doubt and indignation that ordinary people have
towards the ruling class, for our political leaders, in particular. To turn a
profit, a newspaper can’t only focus on safe and ostensibly apolitical stories;
it has to honestly address regular people’s real-life problems and the subsequent
complaints that arise to confront those problems.

The film industry is no different. You can’t sell a movie to
a mass audience by ignoring the problems of the masses. You can’t, for example,
claim that capitalism has given ordinary working people a happy carefree
prosperous life, for one simple reason: ordinary working people don’t live happy
carefree prosperous lives. To sell your movie to a large audience, you have to
either whisk people off to fantasy land (a seemingly apolitical maneuver that,
like a sports article in the newspaper, serves the explicit political function
of providing an escapist compensation for the suffering of real life) or speak directly
to reality, to the very real concerns of the masses, to the material facts of most
people’s lives that can’t be hidden, but in such a way that it avoids any
revolutionary implications. Since certain concrete truths are too obvious to
ignore, modern propaganda works not to hide reality but to obfuscate and disguise
it.

If the US public has developed a growing mistrust of
bureaucratic institutions responsible for intelligence gathering, then your
film, if it wants to connect with the average viewer, should honestly represent
that mistrust. To establish your street cred, so to speak, your film will have
to accurately demonstrate the potential problems associated with massive
surveillance. If certain sections of government can operate in secret and
without democratic oversight, then what’s to prevent those agencies from
forming their own independent agendas and then working against the very
institutions that empowered their autonomy in the first place? What’s to prevent intelligence agencies from
becoming terrorist agencies? Thanks to the recent revelations of Edward Snowden
and Wikileaks, such questions can no longer be laughed off as the conspiracy
paranoia of fanatics. The threat that intelligence agencies pose to democracy
is real, and in the recent film Mission
Impossible Rogue Nation, that very legitimate threat is actualized, at
least in fictional form. Former Secret Service agent Solomon Lane has hijacked
a covert operation of the British government and formed the Syndicate, a rogue international
terrorist organization dedicated to stirring up civil unrest. The Syndicate is
described in the film as doing the exact same thing as the IMF, not the
International Monetary Fund but the Impossible Missions Force, otherwise known
as the good guys. “They’re trained to do what we do,” says Ethan Hunt (Tom
Cruise), the film’s protagonist, an IMF member who goes rogue himself after the
IMF is defunded by congressional committee. And what the IMF does is perform
“impossible missions”, which is a simpler way of saying that they use
technology, information, and trickery to manipulate environmental variables to
produce desired outcomes. Put another
way, they manage history. CIA director Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin) description of
Ethan Hunt would work as a raison d’etre for the IMF as a whole: “the living
manifestation of destiny.”

Michelle Foucoult’s idea of bio-power has been described as
power directed at man in general rather than at specific bodies. Traditional
ideas of power stressed a sovereign’s ability to censor individual bodies, to
repress one’s desire, or, more explicitly, they stressed the sovereign right
and ability to kill; but while coercive power perhaps lurks behind modern
forces of control, it is not, according to theorists such as Foucoult and
Deleuze-Guattari, the primary means by which modern societies are organized and
governed. Today, the freedom of bodies isn’t limited so much as it is forced to
produce. Desire, in today’s culture, doesn’t have to be repressed, it has to be
harnessed, which is accomplished less and less through laws that threaten
punishment when disobeyed, through the threat of violence, and increasingly
through administrative methods, through the creation of environments and
technology that direct and even monopolize attention and therefore behavior in
specific and designed ways, thus mediating social interaction and expression.
No one thinks of a cell phone, pornographic film, or a highway as a type of
social authority, but each of those technologies changes the way we interact
with one another and move through space, thereby not censoring but shaping our
lives and our desires. Power in today’s societies, bio-power, is increasingly not
enforced or imposed but administered. By creating environments that suggest
certain actions while concealing other possibilities, behavior can be managed
with little or no need of explicit force. Today’s leaders, namely those in
administrative positions, rule not with a mighty fist but with scientific
planning principles. Put another way, they manage history. They are the living
manifestation of destiny. As expressed by theorist Giorgio Agamben, life can no
longer be distinguished outside the political technologies of control.

In Antonio Gramsci’s description of the hegemonic process,
we learn that it isn’t necessary for the dominant class to sell a particular
belief-system to the masses. What’s necessary is that the masses don’t acquire
a comprehensive awareness of the hegemonic order that exploits them—that they
don’t too strongly disbelieve in the
system or understand too clearly what “the system” really means. One way to
accomplish that is to represent an outdated mode of power and then condemn it.
Films that vilify capitalists often take this course. Capitalist figures aren’t
treated with much respect by the entertainment industry for several reasons,
one of which is the indisputable fact that the nature of capitalism has changed
and that today’s corporate dominated capitalism, developed with the credit
system, has an increasing tendency to separate administrative functions from
the ownership of capital, a trend Marx foresaw when he declared that it, this trend, "is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself."Truth is, socialized private property, not private property
owned by a few robber barons, has been the dominate form of American capitalism
since as early as the 1930s. Portraying capitalists as evil is as threatening
to modern neo-liberal capitalist hegemony as critiquing the divine right of
kings.1

But films such as MIRN take another approach to navigating
the dictates of capital. MIRN doesn’t try to shift the focus of revolutionary
energies to outdated and irrelevant modes of power, doesn’t channel protest
toward the attacking of windmills, nor does it tell viewers to believe in
Capitalism, or to venerate rich people, or even to trust our governmental
leaders. But it does make any kind of coherent counter-belief (or belief
period) more difficult. The film begins by representing legitimate fears about our
present government’s unchecked and unprecedented surveillance and
intelligence-gathering powers. And the film makes no effort to convince viewers
that those fears are unwarranted. Instead, it conflates our fears of an
autonomous US intelligence agency with fears of terrorism, international
conspiracies, and crime in general. The subtitle of the film, Rogue Nation,
voices a complaint made frequently and convincingly by leftist critics, a
complaint that the United States is the most rogue nation on the planet, that
it operates especially on the international scene and increasingly on the
domestic scene as an unchecked power that flagrantly disregards basic human
rights in order to protect its own interests. But the Rogue Nation of the
film’s title doesn’t refer to the US government, except obliquely; it refers to
the nebulous menace identified as the Syndicate. Sort of. Ethan Hunt and the group he belongs to, the
IMF, also go rogue in the film after the organization’s funding is denied. And
then the two rogue institutions do battle. Going rogue, the film implies, isn’t
the problem. In fact, as our obsession with comic-book superheroes such as
Batman, The Hulk, and the Wolverine attests, one could argue that going rogue
is almost a pre-requisite for becoming an American Hero. The effect of using
the same term to describe so many different types of individuals and
institutions serves to obfuscate our sense of the term as threatening, which
then serves to mitigate our concerns about the rogue powers of government
bureaucracy. Expressing concerns that the NSA could go rogue almost sounds
sexy.

Not only is it sexy, but the idea of going rogue
demonstrates a common device that modern civilizations use to deflect criticism
away from administrative issues, a device Roland Barthes calls inoculation, the
strategy of admitting a little bit of corruption into an institution so as to
ward off awareness of its fundamental problems. 2 We see
inoculation at work, for instance, in the argument that the problem of police
violence isn’t with the official policies and practices of the police
department; it’s just that there are a few bad eggs the department needs to get
rid of. This gives the impression that the institution is capable of reform and
that its problems aren’t systemic. The rogue cop, like the rogue judge, the
rogue CIA agent, the rogue teacher, the rogue bank investor, and the rogue
superhero, plays an important role in maintaining cultural hegemony. The rogue
can serve both as scapegoat and as savior.

If the American public, for good reason, distrusts the CIA
and NSA, distrusts its own legislative bodies as well as those of our closest
allies, such as Britain, then any film that portrays those institutions, if it
wishes to make a profit, has to represent that distrust.

And MIRN does. It
pokes fun of authority of all kinds, from the CIA and the Secret Service to the
legislative bodies ostensibly empowered to keep them in check. MIRN is yet
another anti-authority film, a staple of Hollywood, in which the rogue agent
for Impossible Mission Forces, the other IMF, isn’t just fighting the evil
Syndicate, a rogue outsider nation run by an ex-insider British MI6 agent, he’s
fighting the whole system. And the system, in this case, is somewhat accurately
represented as a system that operates beyond a recognizable or representable
authority, through the bio-power of administrators. The problem, though, is
that the really bad guys, not just the sorta bad guys (CIA), also employ
bio-power to attain their ends. As a result, the problem of bio-power, or this
specific instance of it, which is the use of intelligence and technology to
administer society in ways amenable to the ruling class, isn’t confined solely
to states or corporations, to the ruling class, but to people, nay, to life, in
general—which is exactly what bio-power is, the power to manage bare life. It
isn’t the improper use of bio-power, the film tells us, but bio-power itself
that becomes the problem, which is to say that it isn’t governments or
corporations but life itself and its implicit evil that we have to be concerned
with. In other words, rather than confronting bio-power, we should accept our
democratic sovereignty to administer bio-power ourselves, to become our own
living manifestation of destiny. We should all become administrative managers
of our lives, participate full-on in what Foucoult refers to as the self-care
industry. We should use our inner rogue to combat our inner rogue, for the
enemy and the savior are within ourselves, which is to say that we are all become
homerus sacri and villain at once, both the villain as well as the villain’s
conqueror. Political institutions cannot be blamed for our troubles, nor can we
look to the institutions to save us. We have to save ourselves from ourselves.

The film’s counter-subversive power comes as much through
confusing the potential problems associated with government intelligence
gathering as through the de-politicization of the issue altogether. If going
rogue is hip, then being overtly political is its anti-thesis, and the film
tries hard not to align itself with any specific political agenda. The problem
of going rogue isn’t presented as a problem unique to US intelligence gathering
or to government intelligence gathering period, or even as a problem. It’s
problematic, perhaps, but problematic in the way that human nature is
problematic. It isn’t a problem of the system, a creation of a human
organization; it’s a problem of human nature, of evil people like Solomon Lane,
who will always be with us whether we live under the rule of mercenaries or
kings. That’s the hidden message behind films such as MIRN: it isn’t that your
fear is misguided, it just isn’t thorough enough. You SHOULD be fearful of what
your government leaders might do and about programs that authorize unprecedented
levels of government surveillance—and your fears are well-founded, but you
should also be fearful of those telling you to be fearful, fearful of potential
enemies and the enemies of your enemies and the enemies of those enemies and of
friends, too. Everyone should be under suspicion, because the world is a wicked
place, full of treachery and deceit, which is precisely why we need
intelligence gathering. The message from the film is the same as the message of
the TV series X-files: Trust No One. And since no one or no thing can be
trusted, material reality is no longer an issue. What matters isn’t what’s real
or not real, for who’s to say what’s real in the modern age of the Simulacra?
Neither does it matter whether you believe or disbelieve—it’s that you want to
believe, and what you want to
believe, that’s important.

We all know that the missions of the IMF really are
impossible, except in the alternative universe of Hollywood cinema, but that’s
not the point. What binds us together as members of societies governed by
bio-power isn’t a shared idea of truth, a common belief system that takes
belief seriously; it’s desire that unites us—not really believing but wanting
to believe the same thing. This is where the stunts of the film become more than
just an afterthought or gimmick. In fact, they might be the most important
elements of the Mission Impossible series. Of course we know that in real life you
can’t race through Istanbul on a motorbike at speeds of over a hundred miles an
hour. We know you can’t crash at that speed and escape major injury. But truth
doesn’t matter. Nor does belief. As Slavov Zizec has pointed out, belief and
ideology can be maintained as easily through others as through ourselves—and
that’s true even if the others, the true believers, are completely contrived.
As long as we want there to be someone who believes, that’s all that matters.
That’s enough to maintain the system of belief and all the rituals related to
it. In this case, we want to believe that life is manageable, that we can fully
subjugate all its messy abject qualities into the safe haven of an administered
society—into the polis, which, in today’s world, is almost wholly fictional—a
fictional world that now serves to replace material reality, that mediates our
very access to the material, so that, as in a Concentration Camp or a
monastery, rule and material fact are no longer distinguishable. Our common
desire is for the material to be exorcised from existence so we can thereby
gain the immortality that the proliferation of images has always offered: the
cartooning of the body into a machine that can take ever more severe punishments
and keep on ticking, as something torn out of its original context that now
floats free on the ebb and flow of market forces. Not only is the commodified
body that we create on Facebook and Twitter and Match.com free to circulate in
space, but also it has lost its moorings in the past. 2
The stunts performed in MIRN, like Wily
Coyote cartoons, satisfy the modern mind’s desire to be free of history and
nature, to be liberated in the eternal present of the commodity. This is the
goal of bio power today: to commodify bare life, body and spirit, and it’s our
desire to transcend human limitation, to exile bare life, that binds us to
today’s mechanized power wielders. We wish to exile our natural bodies, the
Homo Sacer of today, and become pure image, a sovereign free and everlasting,
that, like Ethan Hunt, can’t be destroyed because he has fully transformed into
the impossible.

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Few would argue that many of the
cultural ideas and practices that were once perceived as subversive,
the once-alternative values produced by the counter cultures of the
sixties and seventies, have today become commonplace. Anti-capitalist
figures such as Montgomery Burns, Mr. Potter, Jabba the Hut, and
modern versions of Ebenezer Scrooge dominate social media, while
positive capitalist portrayals are not only scarce but presented
usually with subtle apologies or overt defenses. The newest Batman
film, for example, doesn't try so much to sell us on capitalism as to
scare us away from other possibilities. By some accounts it seems
that the counter culture has taken over. Once threatening figures of
resistance such as Martin Luther King and Malcom X are today
celebrated as cultural role models. The free-spirited adventurism and
willingness to try new things--to explore a communal subconscious
that puts ego and social identity at risk--behaviors and attitudes
that once excluded people from succeeding or even participating in
fundamental social institutions, have today become the flexible
skill-set that employers are actively looking for. Formerly radical
praxes such as Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed are
now almost cliche teaching methods of the state/market sponsored
educational system; while Augusto Boal's radical theater games, his
rehearsals for revolution, are commonly taught by corporations in
order to boost company morale and efficiency.

Nevertheless, in spite of the
preponderance of anti-capitalist media production, there seems to be
little evidence that capitalism is actually in trouble. To the
contrary, capitalism seems stronger than ever, but that isn’t to
say, obviously, that capitalism has won over our hearts and
minds—just, perhaps, a part of our minds, a part not overly
concerned with ideology or conscious decision-making. The
counter-culture, as Antonio Negri argues, may have in fact won the
battle but lost the war. What we see in modern culture today, Negri
argues, are the concessions made by capitalism in order to divert
more serious rebellions. Roberto Virno takes Negri's idea a step
further and suggests that the changes brought about by the counter
culture are today the new forces of Post-Fordist capitalist
production. It isn't just that anti-capitalist thoughts have become
absorbed and made non-threatening but that a specific type of
anti-capitalist mind-set is what saved and now drives the modern
capitalist agenda, that the counter-culture is today being harnessed
as a new kind of labor.

Thought of in another way, the hegemony
that has been constructed today is one in which the superstructure
has made peace with the counter-culture and redefined itself,
redefined capitalism, in the process. The ideal citizen/worker under
Neo Liberal Capitalism is not the Marlboro Man, it isn't Ward Cleaver
or Jimmy Stewart; it's the hipster--the suave, non-commital, ironic,
always disoriented but never out-of-place, never to be ridiculed
because never taking himself seriously Everyman who populates both
the swankest downtown cafes and the diviest ghetto and red-neck bars
at once.

Today's American culture is every bit
as or more homogenous as the culture of the conformist era of the
1950s, only the style of homogenization has changed. What we have
today is not a 1950's style homogeneity focused on the conscious
mind, but a deliberate and coherent harnessing of what Virmo refers
to as pre-consciousness. What we have today is a hegemony that
operates not by traditional brainwashing, but through what is
sometimes referred to as Noopolitics--by reducing human behavior to a
pursuit of emotional rather than sensual pleasures and thus
minimizing opportunities for the type of deep reflection that makes
ideology and conscious behavior significant. More concisely, hegemony
today operates not on the active thinking mind but on the mind at
rest. And if it can be shown, as Colin Campbell argues in The
Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, that modern
daily leisure activities serve as a form of productive labor that
involves a reduction of emotional intensity through daydreaming or
dream making--that is, if the passive mind has indeed been
harnessed--and if art inevitably reduces both emotional and sensory
intensity in its pursuit of pleasure, then literary and other arts
become intrinsically involved in upholding the consumer economy, in
acting as a facade that, even if revolutionary in content, can't help
but support the neo liberal Capitalist agenda. Literary artistic
expression becomes a type of subaltern voice that, unless
appropriated, can't be heard or properly spoken.

One recalls Adorno's famously misquoted
phrase about there being no poetry after Aschwitz. What he actually
said, within context, is that: "To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the
knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.
Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one
of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.
Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it
confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation." Adorno
was writing in 1949, at the dawn of American conformism, but his
concern about the complete absorption of the mind by a capitalist or
fascist hegemony is just as relevant today; only, if we take
Noopolitics into consideration, one might argue that today the
primary mind being absorbed is that of the reader rather than the
writer, the audience instead of the creator, that in effect citizens
are being trained to manage their attention in such a way as to
resist conscious
deliberation in deference to pre-conscious activity designed to bring
consumerist pleasure, to the realm where bio and noo politics reign.
The disciplining of the body described by Foucoult (bio-politics) and
the disciplining of the pre-conscious resting mind described by
Lazzarrato (noopolitics) step in to shape attention and behavior
without a need for any explicit ideological support. In terms of
literature, this assumes that no revolutionary or subaltern reading
is possible regardless of how revolutionary a book's content.
Further, one would presume that if an entire culture's readership is
turned into a certain type of reader, that once the reading mind,
which is to say, the passive mind in search of pleasurable
stimulation, is absorbed in this way, then no subaltern voice can be
either read or spoken; the conscious mind is no longer master of
artistic inspiration. In a world focused on regulating subjectivity
rather than the actions of a subject, ideology has little power to
threaten the status-quo or to inform aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics
subsequently falls under the dominion of a new consumerist form of
pleasure-seeking, one dependent on the dreaming self's ability to
defer a genuine expectation of pleasure fulfillment. As Colin
Campbell explains: "The process of day-dreaming intervenes
between the formulation of a desire and its consummation; hence the
desiring and dreaming modes become interfused, with a dream element
entering into desire itself."The pleasure seeker of today still
employs actual memories, Campbell argues, but, through
day-dreaming--by re-imagining real experience to better coincide with
one's fantasies, a never-ending, never-perfected process--the modern
hedonist can heighten gratification by speculating on enjoyments that
are yet to come. He or she can enjoy the anticipation, in other
words, and the act of desiring itself becomes a pleasurable activity.
(p86) Thus, today's principal mode of pleasure-seeking is defined not
as a pursuit of material satisfaction but as a pursuit to remain in
and enjoy the pleasures of being in a state of desiring. Our most
sought for pleasure, that is, is the pleasure of contemplating
pleasure, the activity of daydreaming, of taking pleasure from
"possibilities", of making contact with a fantasy without
fulfilling the fantasy, which would satiate and lead likely to
boredom, would reduce or terminate the sought-for pleasure. Ideally
then, in contrast to both the pure escapist who sets out to enjoy a
fantasy that isn't attainable and, as such, is therefore in search of
a less intense pleasure, or the material pleasure seeker who seeks
attainment in the direct appeasement of the physical senses, the
modern neo-liberal subject wants to maintain the pleasant state of
mind of the daydreamer, someone who is within reach of a tangible
satisfaction but who never attains it, is never fulfilled and thereby
never bored or disillusioned.

As
a consequence, the desiring subject, which is to say a flexible
constantly shape-shifting subject that remains pliable to the demands
of both modern labor and modern consumption, replaces the unified and
conformist subject contested under Fordist Capitalism. Social
relations today require the flexibility and non-commital tolerance of
the day-dreamer. As a result, mere survival now requires being
implicit in, to become the barbarian required of a barbaric system.
Or, to reference Adorno again,
"it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no
longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural
question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially
whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have
been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the
coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without
which there could have been no Auschwitz."

Here
Adorno raises the concern that only the totally dominated mind is
allowed to exist let alone speak. One doesn't, however, have to
dominate the entire mind to accomplish the same level of domination
that Adorno worries about. One merely need create a world requiring
specific parts of the mind to govern behavior more than others, to
make those functions of the mind survival skills, and then to dominate
those particular mental faculties.

So as culture turns away from developed
thoughts or complex narratives, literature gets marginalized, pushed
outside of public discourse while simultaneously made relevant as a
force for counter hegemony--a contrast to the image-based culture
that harnesses counter-cultural ideals and non-reflective attention.
As a result, the texts that tend to get published are texts that
actively defy this new literary potential for subversiveness,
literature that pays homage to the image and to the dominant
discourse by defying consciousness, literature, that is, which not
only avoids but ridicules ideology and thoughtfulness, literature
that actively pushes the reader away from a literary aesthetic and
towards the pseudo-utopian potential of the image--literature, in
other words, that a neo-liberal public will actually want to read. At
the same time, and more importantly, literature that embodies even a
radical critique of the consumer subject, is rendered harmless. More
to the point, popular literature, even if supportive of a
revolutionary and/or subaltern message, becomes counter insurgent by
misrepresenting the system as "authoritative", as being an
ideological power and not a bio or noo power, while art that
challenges the real--and really complex--capitalist apparatus is
doomed to oblivion, to always be steered away from consciousness by
its well-conditioned audience towards the new territory being
exploited, the passive mind. Autonomist literature that tries
not to reinforce traditional subjectivity, which tries, as Samuel
Becket's plays do, to deconstruct the coherent Western subject and
resist commodification, must appeal to consciousness to do so--to a
conscious deactivation of subjectifying forces--but consciousness
doesn't constitute the modern private subject whose individuality is
now a collective and multi-faceted entity produced by and within
consumer culture. Autonomous art must, that is, be reduced to pure
aesthetics, be stripped of ideology, in order to retain its autonomy,
but, once reduced to pure aesthetics, to the non-conceptual, its
reception will be governed by pre-colonized and pre-conscious forces.

In one instance of literary revolt, in
popular literature such as TheHunger Games, we find
capitalism being treated negatively but inaccurately, as being a type
of external authority as opposed to a plastic network that is largely
self-realized. But within a society organized by bio and noo power,
no external authority is required. The result is that this type of
anti-capitalist popular art ultimately strengthens capitalist
hegemony by redirecting revolutionary impulses toward a false facade
that, protected by abstraction, can never be destroyed. The actions
of the counter culture are channeled into a class struggle that only
exists within literary and artistic universes, and revolutionary
activity is downgraded to attacking windmills.

On the other hand, literary artists
that understand and accurately represent modern, complex, and pliant
capitalist forces, are pushed so far outside popular culture as to
have a similar overall effect--that of channeling thoughts of revolt
to a private and personal universe beyond the reach of market
appropriation but also beyond the reach of collective action. Realism
becomes accessible only as pure artifice, within an autonomous zone
that isn't meant to be representational. Consequently, literature is
made less relevant to actual circumstances and revolt can be seen as
a seemingly "detached" activity, one limited to fantasy
production, an already territorialized process. We can revolt all we
want, the modern capitalist system tells us, but only in our
imaginations! Revolutionary resistance is then governed by
pre-conscious activities that can only be satisfied within a private
and pre-territorialized part of the mind. The modern mind's training
in de-emphasizing ideology, in distancing reality and real criticism
in order to maintain pleasurable expectations, and the now
strengthened impetus to defer satisfaction, because the deferment
itself (of Utopian ideals, etc.) is now gratifying, ensures that no
matter how accurate and convincing the artistic critique, it will be
easily converted into a harmless pleasure-fulfillment--a deferred
satisfaction, a possible but never satisfied reality that maintains a
"desiring state of mind" in preference to a concrete plan
for achievement. In short, no matter how authentic a book's
revolutionary criticism, it can be turned into a commodity by its
readers. Liberatory impulses must be re-channeled to a private and
subsequently impotent world. They, like all other impulses and
desires, get pushed inside, forced into becoming part of a private
but multitudinous "inner life", the only life where
liberation is achievable. The day-dreamer which neo-liberal
Capitalist social relations insist upon and reinforce, the person we
have to become to participate within modern society, the person we
must become in order perhaps to survive, is now in charge of our
aesthetic responses and makes sure that no counter ideology can touch
it. The daydreamer, that is, which is today both a producer and a
product of consumer capitalism, becomes skilled at internalizing
utopian aspirations so that they become consumerist pleasures rather
than revolutionary quests. The modern subject is trained to ensure
that possibilities remain possibilities and nothing else, that the
revolutionary impulse is forever deferred and endlessly enjoyed but
never fully gratified or acted on, much like staring at a poster of
the New York City skyline and deriving enjoyment from it by imagining
what it would be like to someday live in the city but repressing and
deferring the urge to actually move there because the reality would
either disillusion or make one imaginatively poorer, with one less
satisfying possibility in one's repertoire from which to derive
emotional enjoyment. Put simply, one must defer material pleasures,
the pleasures of the traditional hedonist, whether it be the enticing
thrills offered by New York City or the social justice of a
post-revolutionary society, in favor of the emotional pleasures begot
by the daydreamer. The revolutionary struggle itself becomes today's
Utopia in place of a post-revolutionary world in which revolutionary
goals have been achieved.

But none of this is to say that all
literature is doomed to degenerate into propaganda or even that
popular genre literature can't contribute to the construction of an
effective counter hegemony, but the task of the revolutionary artist
today, the task, really, of every artist who seeks not to actively
support the status quo, has changed dramatically. The challenge is no
longer to change or influence people's thoughts and opinions, but to
alter the tangible mechanisms of perception. Literature today, as
Deleuze argues, must stake out territory in degenerate networks, thus
reconfiguring meaning and understanding anew. It must hone in on that
which is left over in the hegemonic process, on the pathologies and
disorders of the modern mind which haven't yet been harnessed for
production. But even that isn't enough. Once perception is
reappropriated, new channels for utopian energies have to be created.
The revolutionary impulse mustn't be merely liberated, it must open
onto a counter ideological message, one that isn't imposed but which
emerges from revolutionary praxis rather than from university offices
or mountain-top retreats. Art may not drive effective social change,
but it can facilitate change by focusing on the war of position
advocated by Antonio Gramsci. The literary artist of today cannot
afford to take refuge in solitude, to withdraw into her creativity;
rather, her creativity must develop out of concrete revolutionary
activities and membership within tangible revolutionary communities.
(wherein new identities might be born and endure). In brief, the
artist must become first a revolutionary subject before her art can
speak revolutionary thoughts. She must seek less to create new
worlds, or autonomous but fictional worlds, and instead locate the
anti-alienating forces already with us, those forces already created
by anti-capitalist movements, and to then embody and articulate those
forces in new literary forms. She must become Gramsci's organic
intellectual, a subject whose voice arises directly from within the
revolutionary struggle and who then appropriates literary conventions
(not the other way around) for her own subversive purposes and her
own subversive audience.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Sometimes the doubt gets way too close. I don’t mean doubt about whether God exists or whether I’ll become successful in my career or anything specific. I don’t really know what it is that I doubt, actually. I just know that sometimes it gets too close. If I knew what it was, if I could name what it was that I doubted, it would then be even closer, and unendurable. I can never get close enough to recognize it. I didn’t really stay up on US news while Iwas away. I thought the Te’o story had something to do with parodying Tim Tebow. I’d heard Armstrong was going to have an interview with Oprah, but I didn’t know any of the details until I got back. It seems like the story of our lives, the thin coating we use to name and conceal the scattered rubbish underneath, has become the essence we are most desperate to preserve. And maybe that’s part of what it is that I’m doubting, the story. I want to believe in other people's stories, the story of the cancer survivor who overcame his disease to become a seven time Tour de France champion, for example. And I fully understand why a college student wants to believe in the pretty picture and nice words that come across his computer screen and iphone. I understand why someone would want to believe that life’s tragedies can be remade as heart-warming made-for-cinema victories, would want to confirm those stories, would value the story more than the actual lived experience, would hide the latter with the former. I can understand why someone would lie to preserve his own story, even a false story, see it as a gift to or from others, would do everything he can to make his story true no matter how false, would yield to what’s much bigger than he is.I’m not sure what the narrative of my life would be. I kinda know what I would like it to be, and I know it isn’t what I'd like it it to be, but as long as it’s not over, my life I mean, as long it keeps going, I can hold onto the story and maybe the story, or the idea that there is a story, keeps me going. Part of the doubt that sometimes gets too close, that I can never name or see too clearly, is the concern that without the story there would not be anything left to motivate me, that, though the story be not only a small part of me but a part of me that in truth isn’t really a part of me, is all or mostly lie, I could not exist without it. And perhaps the only part of me that is real, that is me, is the doubt, the part of me I can’t bear to get too close to because, if I did, it would be the end of me.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Follow me, love, for thisthat my heart lead us always awayas a kiss that just awaitswhere by the sun of your eyes we will travelwhere we will find us all of our morningsmouths that open like cathedralsmosques that summon the other’s graceand songs repeating always the same prayersand more yet more than we ever might be.In following, my dear, let that alone be our love and our poetry.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Finally I surrender, love.
The secrets of my desires I will no more withhold.
Spread your dark wings and blow your tempests,
yield up your fires and curses,
and I will be silent
except to pray alone in the night
to your fury.
You may have it all now;
all I can bring out of me is yours.
I will part with everything
if only I might rest in amazement
as you blast me open with your vicious love,
render all that denies me your deep space and stark insanity.

Thursday, November 08, 2012

"These arguments we have are a mark of our
liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations
are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the
issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today."
- Barak Obama

Oh, fantastic. We have free speech in this country. We can argue about which of the two representatives of Goldman
Sachs and Haliburton is the most handsome and enunciates his words
better. And like virtually every other nation in the world, we can go
through a sham election in which the same policies are put in different
wrapping paper and re-sold to us. But we can never forget, Mr. Obama,
that as we speak people right here at home, not just in "distant nations",
are fighting for the chance to argue about the issues that matter--and
they're being stymied by your administration. I'm talking about the same whistle-blowers whose bravery you praised in 2008 but
have piteously hunted down and imprisoned and tortured in the four years
since then. I'm talking about the fact that your administration has
used the notorious Espionage Act more times than all previous presidents
COMBINED, more than Bush/Cheney and the paranoid Nixon administration
or Red-Scared Reagan. I'm talking about the fact that your
administration attempted to use the National Defense Authorization Act
to detain American citizens indefinitely, without trial, just for being
SUSPECTED of having ties to Al Qaeda. And when your abusive practices
were ruled unconstitutional, you promptly put my tax dollars to work in
trying to overturn the ruling. I'm talking about the fact that when
thousands of Occupiers tried to voice their dissent, tried to "argue
about the issues that matter" in locations paid for by their tax dollars
and where they could actually be heard for a change, you called in the
dogs and had them forcefully relocated to far off fields or hidden back
rooms or living room sofas where no one could hear them and their voices
would be effectively silenced. I'm talking about the fact that you
charged John Kiriakou with treason for leaking information about
officials involved in illegal waterboarding in Guantanamo and at the
same time haven't bothered to prosecute a single person who engaged in
or authorized the illegal practice in the first place. I'm talking about
the consistent message your administration has sent out that "respect
for the law" applies only to those people who are victimized by it.

I could go on and on here, but my point is simple: Obama has been
re-elected President, and the country remains the same enemy of freedom
and equality it has always been.